


When We Two Parted

by masterofesoterica



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-17
Updated: 2014-07-17
Packaged: 2018-02-09 06:36:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1972593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterofesoterica/pseuds/masterofesoterica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Victor Frankenstein plays at Creator, buries his feelings and finally ressurects his humanity.</p>
<p>His sweat mingled with his tears. He was feverish; he burned hotter than his mother had done when she had lain in that soft bed of hers, with her blood choking her lungs. He was foolish to think that he could be the child again. For the first time in many years, he wanted to see his father, to tell him of the life he had led, half in shadow and half in brilliant, glorious light.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When We Two Parted

_i._

_Truly that hour foretold_

_Sorrow to this._

 

Nature had never known, never had relished in this moment of life. It was only humanity that recognised it for itself. The pain and the horror.

Tears from his eyes for the child who had thrust his childhood upon another. What would fill up the screaming blackness that now remained? Was he now the tabula rasa once more, or was his slate to be nothing more than a catalogue of sin without the wisdom of having lived? No, no he could not look upon the bloody thing whose skin was writ with a thousand unspoken truths.

His sweat mingled with his tears. He was feverish; he burned hotter than his mother had done when she had lain in that soft bed of hers, with her blood choking her lungs.

He was foolish to think that he could be the child again. For the first time in many years, he wanted to see his father, to tell him of the life he had led, half in shadow and half in brilliant, glorious light, but always at night-time. He wanted to see the flicker of disappointment in Magistrate Frankenstein’s eyes once again, and wanted to feel its keen sting, and its venom like a balm. And he wanted to see his brothers, and this time he would allow their voices to tempt him away from his textbooks; he would follow them into the grounds and catch butterflies, only to let them go again.

His heart beat a staccato rhythm. The lightning lit up the room in flashes: unsynchronised.

The screaming did not cease. It never would. The hand seized him then, stronger than any infant had the right to be. But there was no right here, save for the right he had stolen for himself—that right that the old Romantics took so that they might write of immortality as though it were as easily sedated as a skylark, and then that they might stroke its head and stretch out its wing.

He fled. The child did not leave a scar, not then.

 

 

_ii._

_I_ _hear thy name spoken,_

_And share in its shame._

 

Demon he had called the creation, and demon the creation had been. All twisted and distorted like a reflection of the face of the Creator. He was the tiger to the lamb. Burnished bright and hard by the furnaces from out which came iron and steel that held up the burgeoning London, the bridges and the mills of the modern London. And yet, this new world, inhabited by a multitude of these creatures, could not and would not bend to sweet songs. Then they must break. The death rattle of a butcher would be their bells.

Oh, he had soaked himself already in the blood of these yet unknown, unpenetrated lands!

Demon again, spat back in his face. He had relished it, for the breath was warm and sweet with the fragrance of nuts and berries. He, Frankenstein, was a demon indeed. An incubus to dissect the life from the machine—to render it what it should have always been: a slave.

A slave to the passions of the poets, a slave to the cruelty of man: that was what these things of mechanisation would always be. And nothing more. The spirit that ran through his veins alone would be tyrant and king. That spirit would always crown itself absolute.

How could he explain this? How could he put these things into words sharp enough to piece that artificial skin? They tasted sour on his tongue even as he thought them into being. Words like starbursts, each one flickering and tapering out; and he could only see the pall in those eyes. There was a hunger there that would have twisted his words into the creature’s own. No, no.

He wanted to stroke that white skin to better know the fault lines in his making (tenderly perhaps, were he to be magnanimous). And press his fingers into those fissures so that the thing could not help but feel him there—feel the immense weight of his human spirit like a colossus above him, and all the while, the sands would roll on and on with the wind.

 

 

_iii._

_Long, long shall I rue thee,_

_Too deeply to tell._

 

In his fever dreams, when he was half-starved from having spent his money on new equipment and when his hands smelt of formaldehyde and entrails, he saw those eyes again. And for brief moments of sleep, he felt warm. He inhabited the face, those eyes, it was him staring into the world he did not understand through the attic window—and still everything was the colour of those irises, yellow-tinted. Yellow was always a coward’s colour.

“I am—yet what I am…” he said in the new being’s voice. His mind supplied the words, but he would not speak the rest of them aloud. There the dream always ended, in silence. And then he would wake—the cold as heavy as lead in his bones.

In the mornings he would remember being held by his mother. And her phantom hands would touch his brow, smooth the wrinkles there. He wanted to ask the space beside him if she would smooth the scars to mere memories too. She would have known how to love the thing—she would have given him his father’s name and talked to him of the transitivity of death. And he would have listened with rapture in his eyes—with an adoration that could not comprehend betrayal.

That was before Proteus.

He did not intend Proteus to be a child. Proteus was a soul passing briefly through darkness, Frankenstein needed only to lead him out. And again he would be the man he had observed through his walks by the river—the drowned man. Proteus was his true success. He saw Bradshaw again in his mind’s eye, one moment lying in the long spring grass with maggots at his flesh, and the next, whole once more, yapping and chasing his tail, and running to Victor when his voice called, eagerly nipping at his hand.

How soft, how gentle it could be, he never imagined—this, it was elation, it was overflowing joy as he’d never known before. Life itself became liquid beneath his hand, it was yielding and sweet, it came to him bubbling forth like a wellspring in the rock. It did not know the blood thick with horror; it was lighter than that other Janus-face.

He loved Proteus in the only way he knew how—in the way that his mother had loved him—an ever vigilant bringer of light. Gentle lamb, pastoral in spirit—it was not difficult to care for him. But in that moment when those tender young hands, still callused with a lifetime’s memories, reached out to touch his face with infinite care and curiosity, he felt a black chasm open—it was a ravenous void that he could not cross. A place he did not know: a treacherous land where many lost their wits and their lives.

He wondered then, why those sweet eyes, blue and grey like the sea on a misty morning, would flash with the fire from his dreams.

 

 

_iv._

_How should I greet thee?—_

_With silence and tears._

 

“I could never love you.” A lie, but not quite.

There is a dull gleam there, a shadow passing the candle-flame as the creature processed his words. He wondered if the being could feel it—the not-lie, the half-lie—cradled in his chest. _No matter_ , he imagined the other saying, with regret heavy in the lines of his face, but instead there was hatred, and there was something bitter reflected back at him, something like pity.

No, Frankenstein thought. ( _I will have you love me. I will demand you love me. I give you leave to love me._ )

“I do not seek your love.” Much later, the mellifluous voice ran still through his mind. The words sometimes lost lustre, sometimes regained it. The words were murmured and shouted. They did not change.

He saw those eyes around every street corner. Only sometimes was he dreaming. He felt that the footsteps left behind in the snow were never quite empty. He felt that warm breath, now rank with the stench of blood and flesh, slip down his back—and those hands, their strength and smoothness, curled about his neck like a noose that chafed when he breathed.

Vampires, poor Professor Van Helsing had said. Propagation most unnatural. What would he be doing if he were to fulfil the desires of that creature—to create a mate with which to populate the earth. He wondered whether their offspring might be like any other mortal being—neither swifter nor stronger nor immune to the bodily weaknesses which beset those of Frankenstein’s own spirit. Then would he not cease to be human? Would he not be a god?

He hated himself for thinking it.

There was no doubt of love that living thing would have—his capacity for it gaped like a cold well, empty and echoing in the centre of his chest. Something bitter rose in Frankenstein at the thought of that. He was afraid—he was standing on the edge and looking into the creature’s chest, and he was looking at his own reflection, black and wavering on the surface of that pool—if he only put out an arm, he could rake his fingers across that glassy surface and pierce that reflection, and twist it with a smile.

Ethan could love too; it was clear in those lines around his eyes and in the trembling of his mouth when he looked into the distance sometimes. Frankenstein catalogues this fact amongst the many he has gathered: another painful thing to be savoured in that foggy haze where the sharp edges on his own skin are blunted.

Her body there was so frail, and hot, like his mother’s had been. And the scent of her had been the same, a scent that bought him comfort and infused his dreams. Brona, Brona, Brona—for sadness. Her hand in his had been thin and small like a little girl’s, blood and dirt beneath the nails, but it had felt right after all. He remembered Proteus. She had no place after all, beautiful little girl lost, waiting for her father. Frankenstein would bear her away, to that fire, to that den where salvation might be found. Surrounded by other wild creatures, mightn’t her hatred turn away from God?

Dare he? Those words sounded infernally in his head once more. _I do not seek your love_. Perhaps under those watchful eyes, he would cut some invisible part of his soul and plant it there in the caverns of her body, and there it would spring to life as it never could in his body.

It was right, was it not? After all? Nothing ended, not truly. Frankenstein tightened the belt around his arm; he watched his veins brighten against the scarred skin.

**Author's Note:**

> Quotations from Lord Byron's "When We Two Parted".
> 
> Additional apologies to Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Blake, Clare, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and any other Romantic poet that I ripped off.


End file.
